What is Laravel Framework?

Göktuğ Ceyhan

• 1 June 2022 18:00

Today, many programming languages have their own framework structures. In this blog post, as As IT, we will take a closer look at Laravel, one of the most widely used and popular frameworks of PHP.

Laravel is an open source PHP web application interface designed to develop web applications in the MVC (Model View Controller Framework) structure.

What makes Laravel so popular is that it has an easy syntax structure for developers and the ability to integrate many modules into the project with a single command with its ready-made library. Today, simple, intermediate and advanced projects can be done with Laravel.

HOW DOES LARAVEL WORK?

Laravel MVC structure example.

Laravel works with MVC (Model, View, Controller) structure. The model provides communication between your application and the database. We can say that the controller is the center of the application. The Controller transmits the information from the model to the View, that is, to the area that the user can see, accompanied by the Route. View is the section that contains the pages that users can see. Laravel uses blade engine in View part. Blade engine is a simple yet powerful theme engine.

Since Blade compiles and caches all theme templates with plain PHP codes, it does not negatively affect the performance of the project. Route, on the other hand, is a simple routing mechanism in Laravel that can forward all listed routes on a single page.

WHY IS LARAVEL THE MOST PREFERRED FRAMEWORK?

Some of the reasons why Laravel framework is preferred so much are;

• It comes with a simple authentication system within the Laravel project.
• Thanks to the Eloquent ORM structure, database operations can be done simply.
• Thanks to the MVC infrastructure, code complexity is eliminated.
• It has extensive documentation.
• Today, there are many Laravel communities, so these communities play an active role in solving problems.
• It has a simple and easy usage of routing infrastructure. 

LARAVEL PROJECT INSTALLATION AND BASIC COMMANDS

Since Laravel project runs on PHP, you need composer, which is PHP, Apache or Nginx web server, database and php dependency manager, which must be installed on your system.

The most used artisan commands are as follows.

• php artisan serve : Starts the Laravel project.
  
• php artisan migrate : Performs database synchronization operations.
• php artisan cache:clear : Clears the application cache.
• php artisan config:cache : Caches the configuration file for fast loading.
• php artisan make:auth : It adds the ready user system that comes in Laravel to your application.
• php artisan make:controller <Directory/ControllerName> : It creates a ready controller with the name you want for you.
  
• php artisan make:migration : Creates a migration file for the database.
  
• php artisan make:model : Creates a new Eloquent model object.
  
• php artisan route:clear : Clears the route cache.

All in all, Laravel can be considered a simple, fast and versatile web framework for web developers. You can find the documentation about Laravel at the link here.